Disruption and Death: Telephony, Open Platform and Network APIs

In some ways, the telephony industry is fighting today's battle (relevance and revenue in the evolving mobile data ecosystem) with the techniques that would have won yesterday's war (the fact that Isen was right and the carriers really had to be dumb pipes) had the carriers possessed the foresight to reinvent themselves as Google. The problem is that those techniques may not have worked then, and they certainly won't work now - techniques like the Telco 2.0 manifesto and some of the efforts of telecom companies to be significant players at the application layer. Instead, carriers and everyone else in the telephony value chain need to focus on what they can provide as core value that no one else can provide, and generate revenue there. Delivery will be through APIs, and interesting new partnerships and ecosystems will result. Mashery CEO Oren Michels will bring the appropriate mix of history, reality check and prognostication to facilitate a discussion on the disruption and death in telephony, open platform and APIs.